Sep

What’s Twitter and How Can it Help Me Market My Accounting Practice?

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What’s Twitter and How Can it Help Me Market My Accounting Practice?

There is presently no consensus as to Twitter’s marketing value. Many number crunchers believe the ROI of twitter isn’t high enough to warrant the time spent on it. On the other side there are trendy marketers who jeer at trying to measure the ROI of tools like twitter. Personally I believe in Twitter as a marketing tool, but in the end you’ll need to decide for yourself if you concur.

First… What is Twitter? How does it affect your CPA or accounting Practice?

In the simplest possible terms it enables it’s members to send out short notes, called “Tweets”, to their followers. It is an extremely successful and popular representative of what is generally known as a “social networking site”. This isn’t Email. You don’t get to determine who will see your “Tweets”. Instead they are circulated publicly for everybody see. Your friends, or “followers”, each have their own home page, however, and your message will be added to it so they can see it the next time they log in.

So how can Twitter help you market your CPA practice? There are a lot strategies you can utilize. Let’s kickoff with client retention.

One strong incentive to use Twitter is merely that your a lot of of your clients use it. You are displaying a concern about their lives by following their tweets.

Twitter also offers you a terrific opportunity to keep your brand in front of your clients. Your Tweets are a a terrific tool for showing them that you are working hard for them, and while tweets are really not honestly a very personal method to communication, they do FEEL personal. You will also find out things about your clients that you would not otherwise be privy to just by paying attention to their tweets. You’ll often find it appropriate to answer a tweet on a more intimate level. I’m not just talking about catching a client tweeting about accounting problems that you can help them or their friends with. That happens, but not very often. I’m talking about their “real” lives. As an accountant you are oftentimes not privy to subjects like births, marriages, and deaths in time to send out suitable congratulations or condolences. Twitter will put you in the loop.

Would anyone contend that regular personal contact isn’t good for client retention?

Lastly, all tweets are public. They are posted on the Twitter main homepage (at least for a few New York minutes). There are tools you can use to keep an eye on every Tweet posted and send you an alert if certain keywords, for example, your or one of your associates’ names are used. Using tools like this to discover clients that are talking about you is tremendously helpful. If these posts are agreeable you can thank the poster, and if they are injurious you can address the problem straightaway.

Accuratetly finding Twitters ROI seems unlikely to me. I don’t buy that it’s actually possible to figure the dollar value of these types of client retention strategies. In the defense of Twitter’s many and oftentimes well-thought-of naysayers, there’s also no way to show with any certainty that they succeed either.

Things turn even more murky when you talk about client acquisition, but this is where I submit that Twitter has an opportunity to truly shine.

Again… there are loads of ways.

You can put back links in your tweets. This not only drives guests to your site, if the information you’re linking to is worthy there’s an excellent chance some of your friends will “ReTweet” it. In plain English; they will forward it to their followers. This works wonderfully if you have your own blog, but even if you don’t you could steer them to a free guide on your website, (just as an example) “How to get Top Dollar for Your House”. There’s a good chance that a number of of your followers know at least one person who’s selling a house. If so they might ReTweet it, and this tweet will be broadcast not just to the person who’s selling, but to ALL the ReTweeter’s followers as well. Tweets can, and often do, “go viral”. This can acquaint your brand to loads of new prospects.

In SEO speak: they don’t fetch any “Page Rank” they do fetch a little bit of “Domain Authority” and facilitate the search engines in noticing and indexing new pages.

Now I have made a good living doing professional CPA Website Design for a number of years, so what I’m about to express may give the impression of being self-defeating at the outset. It’s not, though, because I plan my sites with this marketing paradigm in mind: A good accounting site is built to be a networking tool.

The quickest, sharpest, most successful business owners don’t, usually, pick their accountant haphazardly from Bing searches or the local phone book. The better prospects select their CPA or accountant by networking. They contact you because someone they know and hold in high regard advocated for you. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are a material online evolution of traditional network marketing, and as such, deserve serious regard as marketing tools.

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